Why We Love SMU Football
By Dustin Snyder
Love of Sports Correspondent
It seems like only yesterday Eric Dickerson and Craig James sprinted up and down the field for the SMU Mustangs. The program, at that point, was in great shape.
Between 1980 and 1985, the program achieved success it hadn’t seen since the early 1950s. But the sad reality is that those glory days with Bobby Collins as coach and Dickerson in the backfield were a long, long lifetime ago.
The past 23 years, you could say SMU has been serving a life sentence. The decisions handed down by the NCAA for the violations SMU garnered between 1974 and 1987 are well known as the SMU Death Penalty. The carpet-bombing the NCAA waged on the program left them looking like they’d been tied to a horse and dragged from The Hill to the Stockyards and back again.
They never recovered.
But now, for the first time since ‘85, SMU may have a chance to drag itself out of the grave it dug for itself. But therein also lies the possible problem.
It took an enormous amount of campaigning for Athletic Director Steve Orsini to get the money together from the boosters and alumni to pay new head coach June Jones $2 million a year for five years. Jones, a former NFL coach of the Atlanta Falcons as well, had previously taken a destitute Hawai’i program and turned them into the rare BCS buster, winning 12 games last season, nearly going undefeated.
Jones’ work in Hawai’i was nothing short of miraculous. With the lack of facilities and support he encountered on the islands, what he did there is worth immense applause. Maybe he can build another non-BCS powerhouse in Dallas. All Orsini and the excited fans can do is hope this experiment pans out.
When you drive around the Dallas - Fort Worth metroplex, there’s no shortage of advertising for the future of SMU football. Billboards dot the landscape, and there’s a buzz in the air for the first time since those glory days. They even went back to the white helmets. But is there a downpour on the horizon no one else has noticed? Will it be ‘back to the future’ for SMU in a way they totally overlooked?
What you have is a league where virtually every school has dealt with players of questionable character this offseason. Kids are in trouble every day. A lot of it gets swept under the carpet, but more and more the stories are leaking to the media.
That’s good and bad. In a lot of those cases, the universities were criticized for recruiting and accepting players who were ‘bad apples’. SMU’s academics aren’t conducive to bad apples. This is a school with a very prestigious alumni base, and it was a few members of that local alumni that got SMU into trouble in the first place. At the end of the day, the types of people we’re dealing with are the same type of people who pay kids to play ball.
It’s pretty safe to say we all know Jones will need to recruit decent players to get this ball rolling. Locally, he’s recruiting against Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, TCU, Oklahoma, Baylor, LSU, Arkansas and Oklahoma State. SMU should never win a recruiting battle against any of those teams, with the possible exception of TCU. That list doesn’t even include the rash of talent the state loses each season from much larger programs who grab a player here and there.
Under center is reinstated QB Justin Willis, who sat out the spring on a suspension. All he did in 2007 was throw for 3,000 yards. To no one’s surprise, he’s now back as the starter. I’m sure there’s a million SMU fans who were worried he wouldn’t be allowed to play, right?
There’s a formula for success that Jones brings, which is what attracted SMU to him. He took a chance on a kid named Colt Brennan and it paid off 4.4 million fold. Brennan was a quarterback from Colorado who was accused of rape. As far as questionable character goes, there aren’t many things in this world worse than rape. Whether or not those allegations were true or false, what Jones did for him shows how good of a person he really is. He took that chance on someone when no one else would, and there’s generally a case to be made that everyone deserves a shot to redeem themselves and their character. But the fact remains that Jones has shown that propensity to take chances. Is that a good or bad thing in the long run?
It’s a great story locally, and for all of college football, for that matter. Hopefully, after more than two decades of suffering, the SMU players and fans will get to be a part of a great moment in their school’s history. It’ll happen, soon. But hopefully everyone associated with SMU football is smart enough to realize that another situation like the one before won’t just bring another life sentence. They’ll bring Old Sparky out of retirement, and that’ll be the end of that.
Of course, we’re praying that won’t happen. In the meantime, we’ll be jumping on the SMU Mustang Bandwagon.
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